So you may have heard about the whole NAFTA controversy.  It seems that after being pressed by Tim "Reject and Repudiate" Russert on the issue of NAFTA, both Hillary and Obama said essentially the same thing.  They said they wanted to renegotiate NAFTA and were willing to threaten a withdrawal from the treaty as part of that. 

The controversy began when members of Canda's conservative government leaked a memo indicating that they had received assurances from Obama's campaign indicating that he didn't really mean it like that.  When Obama's campaign was confronted with this, they were clearly thrown off balance by it.  They denied it because and didn't know that anybody in their campaign had done this.  Hillary's campaign jumped on it of course and it's very likely this helped her to carry Ohio by the margins that she did.

Well, upon further review, it turns out that this story is totally backwards.  It seems that it was, in fact, Hillary's people who reassured the Canadian government, saying they should take those comments with a grain of salt.  It seems though that our friends in Canada are favoring a Clinton presidency and decided to do a little disinformation campaign in her favor. 

Nice...

I think though, at the end of the day, both candidates have a similar mindset on it.  They do recognize that there are legitimate benefits to global trade, but that we do need to take into account labor and environmental standards in these deals to insure that global trade doesn't become a race to the bottom.  Neither of them is really going to take us out of NAFTA in spite of Tim's terrible question.  I mean sure, asking for renegotiation has the implied threat, "or else," but I don't see that really ever coming up in those discussions.